Various forms of storage systems are used today. These forms include direct attached storage (DAS) network attached storage (NAS) systems, storage area networks (SANs), and others. Network storage systems are commonly used for a variety of purposes, such as providing multiple clients with access to shared data, backing up data and others.
A storage system typically includes at least a computing system executing a storage operating system for storing and retrieving data on behalf of one or more client computing systems (may just be referred to as “client” or “clients”). The storage operating system stores and manages shared data containers in a set of mass storage devices.
Quality of Service (QOS) is a metric used in a storage environment to provide certain throughput for processing input/output (I/O) requests for reading or writing data, a response time goal within, which I/O requests are processed and a number of I/O requests processed within a given time (for example, in a second (IOPS). Throughput means amount of data transferred within a given time, for example, in megabytes per second (Mb/s).
Storage administrators today managing complex networked storage environments may find it challenging to provision or move storage objects like volumes, LUNs and others. Determining if the resources operating in the networked storage environments have enough performance capacity to meet a latency goal can be difficult especially when there are numerous resources for various workloads with varying demands. Continuous efforts are being made to provide better manageability/provisioning solutions for networked storage environments.